Friday, March 30, 2007

MIT Can Shut Down Your Brain

The first paragraph from the article, MIT Neuroengineer's Pulsing Light Silence Overactive Neurons, written by Anne Tafton.

Scientists at the MIT Media Lab have invented a way to reversibly silence brain cells using pulses of yellow light, offering the prospect of controlling the haywire neuron activity that occurs in diseases such as epilepsy and Parkinson's disease.


The entire article can be found here. It is definitely worth reading at least twice.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Let's Get Some Shoes...

"What were you expecting? Condams?" If you know where that is from then you have been to youtube at least once in your life.
This post is for those of you who have been deprived of seeing the Shoes video on youtube. This is personally my favorite video, and I think that I watch it about twice a day.
It was not until a few days ago that I had learned that one of my friends had NEVER been to youtube. Honestly, how do you get accepted to Chicago and yet you have never been to youtube. Well luckily they have such wonderful friends. We just had to introduce them to the world wonder also know as youtube.
One last note: Lawrence and Will, I am making it your personal responsibility to make sure that this person (you know who I am talking about) never forgets that this video is out there.

The Shoes Video:

Sunday, March 11, 2007

PEOPLE WHO ANNOY YOU

No this post is not really about people that annoy me, but I should really make one for that topic in the future.
To stat things off here is the funny video from South Park. It remains funny no matter how many times you watch it.



Well onto a different topic. A few days ago I was looking at the list of math and finance classes that were offered here at UF. Some of the math ones were interesting, especially the ones on probability and differential equations. But, for the most part they all seemed quite dull based on the names. I am sure that if I didn't also want to take finance classes many more of them would appeal to be bust sadly this is not the case. In the same manner not many of the finance classes sounded interesting. The ones that I would really like to take all had a long list of prerequisites. This is going to be a pain. The good news is that the class on risk management only has one prerequisite, and that is a class called Risk and Insurance. Which I probably would have taken anyway. After some thought I don't think that I will double major (math and finance) or even get the minor in actuarial sciences. The main reason for this decision is that to double major I would only be able to take the minimum amount of math electives for the math major since the finance major has a lot of required classes. Also I am not sure that I would be able to finish the double major in four years (yes I sat down and tried to plan it out). The reason for not wanting the minor is kind of childish but still it's a reason. There are just some classes that are required that not to my liking. For instance, the class STA4322 (Mathematical Statistics 2). In stead of taking this I would rather take the class on Probability Theory and the Stochastic Process.
Well now I'm just complaining. Nothing really major to report so I'll get back to studying and programming.